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Welcome to the nexus of ethics, psychology, morality, philosophy and health care

Thursday, April 7, 2016

The Curious Case of Informed Consent for Egg Donation

by Alana Rose CattapanBMJ Blogs
Originally posted March 17, 2016

As Michael Dunn writes in a recent editorial for the JME, “no medical ethicist worth their salt would deny that consent is a foundational concept in contemporary medical ethics,” and it is an extraordinary understatement to say that much ink has been spilled on the topic. The spaces between consent in theory and in practice is the subject of Dunn’s editorial, where he describes the ways that scholarship about consent fails, at times, to account for the messiness of the real-life process.

Obtaining consent for egg donation is a particularly messy endeavour. We still know relatively little about the long term effects of egg donation, and donors are sometimes seen as secondary players while the recipient of the eggs – the woman carrying a pregnancy and having a child – is viewed as the primary patient. Like other corporeal donations – blood, organ, bone marrow – egg donation presents a curious case of medical treatment in which there are no physiological benefits to the donor.The blog post is here.